In the lobby of the Space Hotel, Mr Wonka had merely paused in order to think up another verse, and he was just about to start off again when a frightful piercing scream stopped him cold. The screamer was Grandma Josephine. She was sitting up in bed and pointing with a shaking finger at the lifts at the far end of the lobby. She screamed a second time, still pointing, and all eyes turned toward the lifts. The door of the one on the left was sliding slowly open and the watchers could clearly see that there was something … something thick … something brown … something not exactly brown, but greenish-brown … something with slimy skin and large eyes … squatting inside the lift!
7
Something Nasty in the Lifts
Grandma Josephine had stopped screaming now. She had gone rigid with shock. The rest
of the group by the bed, including Charlie and Grandpa Joe, had become as still as stone.
They dared not move. They dared hardly breathe. And Mr Wonka, who had swung quickly
around to look when the first scream came, was as dumbstruck as the rest. He stood
motionless, gaping at the thing in the lift, his mouth slightly open, his eyes stretched wide
as two wheels. What he saw, what they all saw, was this:
It looked more than anything like an enormous egg balanced on its pointed end. It was as tall as a big boy and wider than the fattest man. The greenish-brown skin had a shiny wettish appearance and there were wrinkles in it. About three-quarters of the way up, in the widest part, there were two large round eyes as big as tea-cups. The eyes were white, but each had a brilliant red pupil in the centre. The red pupils were resting on Mr Wonka. But now they began travelling slowly across to Charlie and Grandpa Joe and the others by the bed, settling upon them and gazing at them with a cold malevolent stare. The eyes were everything. There were no other features, no nose or mouth or ears, but the entire egg-shaped body was itself moving very very slightly, pulsing and bulging gently here and there as though the skin were filled with some thick fluid.